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Featured in Development

Peter Alvaro talks about the reasons one should engage in language design and why many of us would (or should) do something so perverse as to design a language that no one will ever use. He shares some of the extreme and sometimes obnoxious opinions that guided his design process.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Today on The InfoQ Podcast, Wes talks with Katharine Jarmul about privacy and fairness in machine learning algorithms. Jarul discusses what’s meant by Ethical Machine Learning and some things to consider when working towards achieving fairness. Jarmul is the co-founder at KIProtect a machine learning security and privacy firm based in Germany and is one of the three keynote speakers at QCon.ai.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Organizations struggle to scale their agility. While every organization is different, common patterns explain the major challenges that most organizations face: organizational design, trying to copy others, “one-size-fits-all” scaling, scaling in siloes, and neglecting engineering practices. This article explains why, what to do about it, and how the three leading scaling frameworks compare.

InfoQ’s 2018, and What We Expect to See in 2019

Key Takeaways

Both Java and .NET content continues to be a huge part of what InfoQ does. We see strong interest in the Java language, C# and JavaScript. Amongst the other languages that InfoQ covers, we’re continuing to see particularly strong interest in Rust, Swift, and Go.

We saw a growing interest in ethical perspectives on technology, partly driven by the European Union GDPR regulation. It seems reasonable to assume that considerably more regulation around privacy will appear over the next few years

The microservices architecture style remains a huge part of our architecture related news and feature content. We see strong interest in related topics, in particular domain driven design, and a growing interest in chaos engineering.

We believe that data engineering and machine learning are fast becoming key skills for software developers and we’re seeing rapidly growing demand for our content in this area.

We’re seeing some signs of consolidation in the cloud space with IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat. Verizon, AT&T, Cisco Systems, and the former Hewlett-Packard have already quit the public cloud business due to a lack of customer traction and competition from AWS. We expect more similar activity in the next few years.

The past year saw issues around security, in particular CPU vulnerabilities in the form of Spectre and Meltdown coming front and centre. Writing for InfoQ, Chris Swan provided a thorough look at:

...the characteristics of the vulnerability and potential attacks, why it's necessary to patch cloud virtual machines even though the cloud service providers have already applied patches, the nature of the performance impact and how it's affecting real world applications, the need for threat modelling, the role of anti virus, how hardware is affected, and what's likely to change in the long term.

We also saw the emergence of tech ethics as a key subject of discussion at QCon and online, with our ethics eMag proving popular. We think that QCon London may well have been the first mainstream software conference to feature an ethics track. Other key ethics content from 2018 included:

.NET

C# featured prominently in our news coverage with the release of C# 7.3 and the forthcoming C# 8 dominating our newscycle. The series of announcements from the Build conference relating to C#’s future also drew tremendous reader interest.

Looking at our feature content, the main areas of interest were .NET Core and C# 8:

JavaScript

JavaScript, particularly the frameworks around it, seem to turn over so quickly that it can be incredibly difficult to keep up, and given that it is perhaps unsurprising to see how popular our web trends report is with readers. In terms of our big web-development news stories, Tim Berners-Lee’s introduction of the Solid decentralized identity platform was a major story. We also saw a great deal of interest in Tensorflow for JavaScript and Angular. Our video and feature content showed a strong interest in GraphQL and WebAssembly with:

DevOps (and cloud)

Back in January, we wrote about how Kubernetes had won in container orchestration, and interest in Kubernetes remained strong during the year. The Google Cloud Next 2018 release of Knative, developed by Google in close partnership with Pivotal, IBM, Red Hat, and SAP, sought to consolidate the position. We also saw strong interest in site reliability engineering — another idea popularised by Google.

2019

In the coming year, we expect we’ll continue to see machine learning being used to try to solve a variety of problems. Benedict Evans, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has suggested that the sectors of fashion, cosmetics, glasses, and grocery retail could soon see disruption. Companies like Stitch Fix are already exploring what happens when you apply machine learning to help shoppers choose outfits and the online supermarket Ocado is amongst those combining cloud, machine learning, and robotics to disrupt grocery retail.

As we’ve seen with the Apple Watch’s fall detection and ECG capabilities, wearables open up a range of new possibilities for health and fitness. It is easy to be somewhat blasé about this, but the data that these technologies can provide, combined with machine-learning techniques, open up intriguing possibilities for drug trials, as well as for areas like monitoring sleep patterns and managing common conditions such as diabetes.

We expect to see growing interest in alternative forms of human-computer interaction — voice, AR/VR, and neural interfaces. In many cases, the form factors for these still appear to be some way off, but it feels like another paradigm shift similar to that we saw with touch may not be too far away.

It seems reasonable to assume that considerably more regulation around privacy will appear over the next few years, as governments and regulators grapple with not only social media but also who owns the data from technology like AR glasses or self-driving cars. Already, other locales are adopting GDPR-esque legislation, for example California’s Consumer Privacy Act was signed into law in June this year, closely following a similar bill in the State of Vermont.

Finally, we’re seeing some signs of consolidation in the cloud space with IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat. IBM and Oracle have both struggled to make headway against Amazon Web Services, who announced another huge collection of services at Re:Invent towards the end of the year, and it seems likely that we’ll see further consolidation in the next few years. Verizon, AT&T, Cisco Systems, and the former Hewlett-Packard have already quit the public cloud business due to a lack of customer traction and competition from AWS, and it seems reasonable to assume that we could see other exits and perhaps acquisitions in the next year.